Having been nominated for Best Gun Pr0n (and you *can still* vote), it's time for something I haven't done in a while - Gun Pr0n! One reason I haven't is because doing these right takes a lot of time and I haven't had a lot of time lately, and I'm a slug and like to sleep. I know. A weakness to be sure. This one took 12 hours total out of my life this week.

So, you've met the Castle Luger, Georg. You can check out his story here. You can get a sense of his prowess in the hands of a mediocre shooter here.

The basics of the Luger story are simple, though there are *several* good books out there if you are into geek-level detail. This is a blog, we'll skip that for a precis...

The Luger is one of the most distinctive and widely-recognized pistols the world over. You can thank WWI, WWII, and war movies for that. Well, that, and perhaps because the Luger Navy Model of 1904 introduced the world to the 9mm Euroweenie pellet, as Kim du Toit is want to call that round. Regardless of what I or Kim think, however, it is the most common pistol and sub-machine gun round, and the Luger Navy Model of 1904 introduced it to the world. Georg Luger was the designer of that bullet, building on his design of the 7.65 Luger round, which he developed after recognizing the need to make shorter, yet reasonably powerful rounds if automatic pistols were going to get down to a useful size.

The impetus for the development of the Luger pistol gathered steam in the period of 1890-1900. The gunmakers in Europe and the US were angling to land large military orders as the 1st rank armies of Europe were looking to modernize, and the US Army had discovered weaknesses in it’s arms in the Spanish American War. In Germany it was DWM, Mauser, and Bergmann; in England Webley &Scott, to name some of the major players. US interest came on the heels of the success of the European efforts.

What most people I’ve talked to don't know is that the Luger has an sorta-American connection. Georg Luger, the primary engineer, collaborated with the Hugo Borchardt to develop the first Luger pistol, improving on Borchardt's initial design by removing the balance and handling-destroying rear overhang and replacing it with a recoil link and spring in the butt of the pistol, vastly improving the handling of the pistol.

Submitted to the Swiss Army trials of 1898, it was adopted by the Swiss in 1900 as the Ordnance Pistol 1900. A quick distinguishing characteristic of the Swiss pistol is a grip safety that you don’t find on the German pistols - as you can see on these examples. The OP 1900 was chambered for the bottle-necked 7.65mm (called .30 Luger by us 'Muricans), and was as finely crafted a pistol as anything mechanical or chocolate the Swiss have ever produced.

Lugers were produced in Germany by primarily Deutsche Waffen Und Munitionsfabriken (DWM, the builder of Georg the Castle Luger), as well as Simson, Krieghoff, the Erfurt Arsenal, and Mauser. Vickers in England made them for the Dutch, and, as previously mentioned, the Swiss produced them at their Bern Arsenal. No one knows how many were produced due to destruction of German records during WWII, but the guesstimate is better than 2.5 million. Damn things still cost a lot for all that production!

The Kriegsmarine (Navy) was the first German adopter, in 1904, and it is they who gave us the Luger chambered for the 9mm Parabellum round, and a 6 inch barrel. The German Army adopted the Luger as the Pistole Model of 1908 in (drum roll, please) 1908, with a 4 inch barrel. Usually abbreviated P08, this is the version most of us are familiar with, though there have been many other models (see those books for geeks I was talking about). DWM produced the pistol until 1930, when it was taken over by Mauser. The Luger remained the German Army's official sidearm until the adoption of the Walther P38 in 1938, with production continuing through 1943, and issue continued throughout the war and beyond, in East German service. Counting the German variations of the P08, there were, IIRC, about 35 different variations of the Luger produced, and it has been produced in specialty runs at least as late as the 1980s, and perhaps more recently than that – but we all know I’m weak on stuff less than 50 years old…

The other relatively famous version of the Luger you might be familiar with is the Model 1914, the long-barreled version, sometimes called the "Artillery Luger" which was fitted with a long barrel that had integral long range sights, and was often used in conjunction with a wooden shoulder-stock/holster that locked onto the grip. It was for this pistol, in Air Force use, that the 32 round snail drum magazine was developed, as a way to arm pilots when the "Knights of the Air" took to shooting at each other before they got their machine guns all figured out. That pistol uses standard P08 components less the barrel and sights - and in fact, all Lugers produced for the German army have their grips slotted for the stock - even after they no longer made the M1914 or stocks.

Okay - so skip all the history carp and get on to the good stuff!

If ya wanna see him nekkid and exposed... and understand how he works, then come back, behind the curtain, to the peep show in the Flash Traffic/Extended Entry!

Heh. My kinda people!

Georg, like several of the early automatic pistols, uses dual recoil. In his case, that means that the action remains locked, and recoils as a unit, until the round knob on the toggle hits the ramp, which breaks the toggle upward. This is the basis of Borchardt’s contribution to the design. Then the bolt and toggle continue to the rear, giving that awkward humped appearance during firing and when the bolt locks back on an empty magazine.

The other famous German pistol of the era, the Mauser Broomhandle (seen here hiding amongst other Castle holdings - he's the leftmost wooden-stocked pistol - the other one is the Castle Inglis Hi-Power), also uses dual recoil, though in a different manner - and a subject of a different post. If you look at most automatics today, they still do that, though in a sneaky way requiring far fewer moving parts - the genius of John Browning. The toggle link of the M1911 style pistols does exactly the same thing the Luger's toggle link does - keeps the barrel locked during initial recoil, then, by being anchored to the frame rather than the slide, pulls the barrel out of battery and the slide continues to the rear. Again, the subject of another post.

Just as the genius of the Vickers machine gun was to change the way the toggle of the Maxim worked (and Browning’s MG genius was getting rid of the toggle altogether) so too changing the anchor point of the toggle from the slide to the frame vastly simplified the design, manufacture, and reliability of the automatic pistol by keeping all the moving parts inside the pistol and away from icky things like mud and dust and sand, all of which make Georg the Castle Luger and his brethren persnickety. And when Mean People Who Suck™ are trying to kill you, that is Very Annoying™. Very annoying, indeed.

Where was I? Oh, yeah – we’ve just finished the recoil stroke and now the bolt goes forward, strips a round, then the bolt hits home, the toggle and slide lock, and we’re ready to do it all again.

The Luger has some interesting characteristics. There isn’t a hammer. The sear bar (which the trigger lever acts on to release the firing pin) is actually exposed to view. The spring in the butt, which for most automatics, would be the hammer spring, is the recoil spring. And man, I’m really a geek….

For all his complexity, Georg is not hard to take apart and put back together. Nor, unless you get ambitious, are any parts going to come shooting out to get lost in the carpet. *I’m* not going to tell you how to pull it apart enough for that to happen – so if you lose pins and set screws – you’ve been playing gunsmith without a license.

Okay, let’s play!

First, put the pistol on safe (gesichert). Remove the magazine. Grab the circular knobs on the toggle and pull up – visually inspect and clear the chamber. Always, always, always clear the weapon before you do anything with it. And remember to take the magazine out first. Some of my funnier war stories involve people (*never* me) who forgot to take the magazine out first. Hi Mike! Remember - Safety On. I should take time to be pedantic about how the safety works, eh? Besides I took the pic and made this pretty graphic...

Okay - to continue, you have to free up the take-down bolt. To do that, you have to push back the slide a bit – which is a challenge, since the recoil spring is stout. Wimps and girly-men will put the pistol muzzle down on the table, or push it against the wall or similar surface, and then you push the take-down bolt down. The Armorer, being lazy and not wanting SWWBO to kill him for leaving muzzle dents in the furniture and walls, grasps the pistol in his right hand, and pushes it against the palm of his left hand, using his left thumb to push down the take-down bolt. See why I’m so anal about Clearing the Weapon? I have a personal stake. I’m left handed. Get your mind out of the gutter, sheesh. Okay, pull out the pin. Oops. What was that tinkling sound on the floor? That was the sideplate falling away... Actually, if you hold the pistol tilted with the left side facing slightly up, that won’t happen.

Take a look at that sideplate. It’s actually a key component. First, it covers the exposed sear bar, preventing accidental discharges. Second, it contains the lever which the trigger works on to release the sear, firing the pistol. With the take-down bolt removed, the slide will now come off. Pull the toggle up, and you can now pull the toggle pin and remove the toggle and bolt.

Now you can see how the bolt works. As the bolt recoils, the cam on the forward toggle link pulls back the firing pin against spring pressure. As the bolt goes forward, the pin is held back by the notch on the sear bar. At this point, you’ve taken it as far apart as you generally need to, but there is one more level you can go. Bolt disassembly. Whee!

Take a flat tip screwdriver, insert it into the slot on the firing pin guide at the rear of the bolt, turn it ¼ to the right – and the guide, spring, and firing pin will come out. Under tension, so be careful. Clean it all, nice light coat of oil, and pretty much assembly is the reverse of disassembly.

Anyway – there it is – Georg, the Castle Luger, bares his inner sekrits!

Move along, there’s nothing to see here. The show's over!

Wait! What's that? You want an encore, you say? You are such a geek that you want an exploded drawing of the Luger and all the fiddly bits?

Say no more! Click here.